BT Mad-as-a-fish?

[m419]

There is Plusnet and now there is Mad-as-a-fish www.madasafish.com which is part of Brightview is wholly owned by BT plc according to there website.

and just look at there prices! What a difference to the main BT Broadband product!

[Maggy J]

Good grief! Is madasafish STILL going?

[m419]

Yes and BT are running it haha

---------- Post added at 14:11 ---------- Previous post was at 14:00 ----------

Originally Posted by m419

Yes and BT are running it haha

And IC24! it must have been swallowed up by Plusnet and Madasafish.

www.ic24.com brings you to Madasafish
www.ic24.co.uk brings you to Plusnet

[DaiNasty]

Originally Posted by m419

and just look at there prices! What a difference to the main BT Broadband product!

Note that the £9.99 is a 6-month introductory offer..

[m419]

Ahh! A big BT giveaway hahaha with there small print saying for the first three months. I find it funny when they advertised a tripple play deal for Phone,Broadband and Vision for about £20 per month and then I saw in small print for the first 3 months then £48.99 thereafter I was like, yeah whatever!!!!

£48.99 for freeview with a bit of on demand,unlimited calls to landlines and 10GB Broadband at 7MB, NO DEAL!

For that you can get Virgin TV XL,Talk unlimited and 20MB Broadband plus calling features.

[Ignitionnet]

I'm extremely confused as to the point of this thread beyond it being to bash BT.

Yes BT own MAAF, they bought them 3 years ago.

BT's own products, MAAF and Plusnet are aimed at different markets. BT have nearly 5 million customers on their BT Total product so must be doing something right somewhere along the line. No point in dropping your prices if the sheeple will pay it.

[weesteev]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

BT have nearly 5 million customers on their BT Total product so must be doing something right somewhere along the line.

Monopoly? Consumer Lack of awareness of other providers?

Is it what BT are doing right or what consumers are doing wrong?

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by weesteev

Monopoly? Consumer Lack of awareness of other providers?

Is it what BT are doing right or what consumers are doing wrong?

Or what competitors are doing wrong in failing to make people more aware of their products over BT's pretty mediocre offerings?

Consumers can only choose based on what they know to be available to them after all.

I must be missing the whole monopoly thing though. One national network operator that serves homes directly has to sell access to their infrastructure, at physical and logical levels, at regulated rates while another gets to keep it all to themselves so it'd appear that at retail and wholesale level there's only one national telecomms company in the UK that's allowed to run as a fully vertically integrated monopoly across the network, wholesale and retail level and it's not BT.

Even where there's no wholesale competition, so called 'Market 1' areas, there are still hundreds of retail offerings which a customer can avail themselves of both for broadband, telephony and line rental.

[m419]

Its all down to brands, I always hear BT customers saying 'Well I have been with BT for over 30 years blah blah blah' But yet they still complain about there service.

Interest in changing providers has always been slow in the UK, I mean you have been able to change your phone company/provider for years since the 80's in fact.

Mercury launched its 131 and 132 service in the late 80's
Mercury launched its Payphone service in 1986 together with Mercury Chargecard and prepaid calling cards.
Mercury had its own infrastructure to the premises for businesses.
Cable companies began providing there own telephone lines but routed most calls down Mercury's network.

Then in 1998, other phone companies launched such as One Tel.

In 1997, Mercury's Chargecard only made up of 7% of the Chargecard market whilst BT Chargecard made up of 93%.

In 2000 Mercury's 131 and 132 service had around under 200,000 subscribers whilst Cable companies had around 3 Million phone customers. This service was offloaded to NTL together with the Cable and Wireless Cable franchise business.

Its only around from 2005 onwards people began to switch.

Tele2 launched in the UK around 2003 and proved to be a flop, it only attracted 188,000 customers.

In 2008, Orange formerly Wanadoo/Freeserve was losing 150,000 customers a quarter, however this was purely down to poor service as most people know.

The same is with utility providers as well, since 1997, it has been developing so slow! about 5 or 6 years ago, everyone still used British Gas!

[Turkey Machine]

The problem with consumers is two-fold.

Residential customers only used to know BT and cable but thanks to TalkTalk, Sky, BT and Virgin Media are getting better products cheaper than ever before, even with the somewhat ludicrous limits and contracts placed on those products. Who has the majority? BT. Score 1 for them.

Business customers for years and years paid over the odds for BT's lines, analogue and ISDN. Then Ofcom forced them to sell wholesale and now everybody undercuts BT but still BT have the massive majority in this market which is slowly but surely decreasing. Score 2.

VoIP telephony is now making a headway in this country but businesses are still slow on the take-up based on 2 things - internet access and the call costs. Most businesses can't justify the expense of installing a couple of data lines for redundancy, and replacing the telephone system with IP phones. The advantages are numerous (portability being one, you can move offices at the drop of a hat and still retain the setup), but businesses won't see or don't want to see the difference because they only know BT / Opal / COLT etc. Score 2.5.

In residential and business, everybody buys from BT Wholesale and everybody uses Openreach for the maintenance and installs. Even Virgin Media buy from BT for some of their services. The problem comes when there's a monopoly and no way to split it fairly.

[Andyband]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

I'm extremely confused as to the point of this thread beyond it being to bash BT.

Yes BT own MAAF, they bought them 3 years ago.

BT's own products, MAAF and Plusnet are aimed at different markets. BT have nearly 5 million customers on their BT Total product so must be doing something right somewhere along the line. No point in dropping your prices if the sheeple will pay it.

I guess the OP felt that they were educating those that do not read the small print of who owns what website, so that they knew if they switched from BT to madasfish, they were still going with a BT owned company? Just a thought.

I guess its a bit like the out of town PC World/Dixons/Currys stores often being clumped together, people think they can choose to avoid one of those stores if they do not like the company and, for one reason or another wish to 'vote with their £' and shop at one of the others, not knowing that in fact all 3 are owned by Dixons Groups plc.

[m419]

Originally Posted by Andyband

I guess the OP felt that they were educating those that do not read the small print of who owns what website, so that they knew if they switched from BT to madasfish, they were still going with a BT owned company? Just a thought.

I guess its a bit like the out of town PC World/Dixons/Currys stores often being clumped together, people think they can choose to avoid one of those stores if they do not like the company and, for one reason or another wish to 'vote with their £' and shop at one of the others, not knowing that in fact all 3 are owned by Dixons Groups plc.

Thats right Andyband!

Same with 3,Superdrug,The Perfume Shop and Savers, all owned by Hutchison.

But back to the subject,someone said phone services are getting cheaper.

Well I have to disagree, in 1997, the price of a national phone call on BT was about 8p per minute, its slowly creeping back to that! On Cable it was about 5p per minute and now its nearly double that outside allowances.

And line rental on BT back then was about £9.99, on Cable it was about £6.99, its now £11.99 on Cable and £12.50 on BT.

BT Directory Enquiries and Mercury/Cable and Wireless Directory Enquiries on 142 and 192 costed no more than 60p per minute, now its £1.16 per minute on BT 118500 and 118099 Cable and Wireless is just 35p per call at the moment.

At one point Directory Enquiries was free and then was just free from payphones and then BT flooded in a charge for that.

[Ignitionnet]

High per-minute prices purely exist to push people towards inclusive call packages. Directory Enquiries charging was a result of liberalisation of the market. A person can spend hours a day on the phone now and, so long as they redial every 60 minutes, pay less than 20GBP/month.